This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art, which may be related to various aspects of the present invention that are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
As the access point at the home gateway is fast evolving into a central point for all communications to and within the home, including media streams, rate assurance for such streaming connections becomes a concern.
For example, the issue of media stream protection, in particular for video streams, was addressed in various scenarios including wireless access points. Prior work on video protection in wireless local area networks (WLANs) fall under various categories: error control techniques like improving video quality through protection from signal fading and interference, retransmission strategies like prioritization of retransmissions to recover packet losses and application-layer forward error correction and bandwidth-adaptive scalable coding. Existing methods that adapt video quality to network condition require detection of available bandwidth, including an estimation of the capacity which is complicated in WLANs, for example.
In times of congestion or heavy traffic, priority or preferential allocation to access to media streams emerges as being crucial in networks.
For instance, the document US 2007/0133405 A1 discloses a media server system comprising a content source and a playback device, both connected to a media server. The media server converts content into packetized data and transmits the data to the playback device. A congestion controller monitors a buffer status of the playback device as well as network performance. In case congestion is detected a transrater changes bit rate or data density of the content.
Moreover, a wireless base station device is disclosed in document US 2006/0126507 A1. The wireless base station device comprises baseband processors and is connected to a wireless base station controller. The wireless base station controller sends data flows to several users via the baseband processors of the wireless base station device. Each baseband processor comprises a congestion monitor that monitors a reception bandwidth usage. If congestion is detected a flow controller controls the data flow of each user.
Besides, the document U.S. Pat. No. 6,469,991 B1 relates to a medium access control protocol known as “on-demand multiple access fair queuing”. If downlink/uplink buffer occupancy of a network exceeds a threshold a base station determines if this is caused by a specific remote host or by a group of remote hosts. The base station may disconnect remote hosts from the network, if network performance is low.